On top of the air mattress and sleeping bag and thin nylon rope lay the knife and my bow and four arrows. The rope I had bought on impulse at an army surplus store, mainly because Lewis had once told me that you should “never be in the woods without rope.” I picked the bow up off it, enjoying the cold, smooth feel of the recurves. It was a good one; better, probably, than I deserved. It was not one of the standard makes—a Drake, for example, or a Ben Pearson or a Howatt or a Bear—but was homemade from what seemed to be a kind of composite design that ended up by looking and shooting like none of these. The handle section was heavy, and it actually looked like an experimental bow. I had come to like the weight and depth of the handle, though, and wouldn’t have felt comfortable with anything smaller. Lewis had got it for me secondhand from a former state champion who’d made it, and who shot the same kind of bow, and he kept telling me of advantages which began, as I remember, by seeming completely psychological, but gradually came to seem real ones. There was, in fact, very little hand shock on release. The arrow went off very smoothly, and quietly, too. It had nothing like the snap or kick of Lewis’ bows. The initial tip speed was nothing extra; the first time I shot it I thought it was terribly slow until I checked my point of aim and found that the bow was point-blank at sixty-five yards. When the string was released, the bow seemed to hesitate, and then the limbs gained speed at a terrific rate, and the arrow left the string with the feel of being not so much shot as catapulted. The trajectory was as flat as any bow I’d ever seen, and the left-right problem was not nearly so pronounced as it was in Lewis’ bows. Now, as I held it and looked at it, with its white Gordon-Glas inner and outer faces, it seemed exactly the bow I ought to have. I depended on it and believed in it, though the laminations were beginning to tire a little, letting a few fiber glass splinters half-rise from the edges of the upper limb. I had a new string, too. Unlike Lewis, I used a peep sight in the string, and there I had something really good. Martha and I had separated the Dacron strands, put snap fasteners between them, and Martha had wrapped the separated halves with orange thread. It was a very handsome bowstring, and I enjoyed using it. When the bow was at full draw, the peep sight came naturally back to the eye and the target came to rest within it, trembling with the effort of the body to keep still. The effect of framing the target was a big advantage, at least to me, for it isolated what was being shot at, and brought it into an oddly intimate relation with the archer. Nothing outside the orange frame existed, and what was inside it was there in a terribly vital and consequential way; it was as though the target were being created by the eye that watched it.
The arrows were not so good, though they would do. They were aluminum, for I shot aluminum target arrows, and I knew from experience that arrows of this spine and length—twenty-nine inches—would shoot accurately out of my bow. They were in a bow quiver taped to the bow, for I wanted to be able to carry everything in one hand, and I had no back quiver anyway. They looked deadly, with their two-bladed Howard Hill broadheads and long yellow helical fletches. I had tried to camouflage them with black and green house paint, making random slashes up and down the shafts, and I had sharpened the heads on one of my neighbors’ emery wheel. That was one thing I had done well, for they were nearly as sharp as new razor blades. They would shave hair, and I had also put on them, with a file, a slight burring roughness, very good for deep cutting, so said the archery magazines. I felt the edge of one of them with a thumb, and then drew back into the light of the hall to see if I had cut myself.
I hadn’t, and I went back to the bedroom, got twenty dollars from my wallet, then walked back out through the living room to the kitchen, where Martha was moving barefooted back and forth in front of the stove, her glasses winking, and stared out into the backyard. I had my tennis shoes in my hand and sat down on the floor to put them on, still looking out behind the house. The trees there seemed perfectly wild, free objects that only by accident occurred in a domestic setting, and for some reason or other I felt strangely moved. Dean came up behind me and pulled at the leg-back of my flying suit. I picked him up, still looking out at where I lived. Usually children are bored with that sort of thing, not understanding how someone can look where nothing is moving. This time, though, Dean was as quiet as I was, observing what existed. I kissed him and he held me close around the neck. He was not ordinarily an affectionate child, and his acting this way made me nervous. Martha also came up, her face warm from the upcast heat of the stove. I got up, and we stood like a family group.
“Do you know where you’re going?” she said.
“Not exactly. Lewis does. Somewhere up in the northeast part of the state, where he’s been fishing. If everything goes off OK, we ought to be back late Sunday.”
“Why wouldn’t it go off OK?”
“It will, but you can’t predict. Listen, if I thought there was anything dangerous about it, I wouldn’t go. Believe me, I wouldn’t. It’s just a chance to get out a little. And they say the mountains are really beautiful this time of year. I’ll get some pictures, come to think of it.”
I went back to the bedroom once again and picked up a Rolleiflex that belonged to the studio. I also got another bowstring and put it in the leg pocket of my outfit. When I came back, Lewis had driven in. I put one arm around Martha as around a buddy, and then changed and held her with both hands, locking them, while Dean went around behind her and tried to get them loose. I opened the door, and by that time Lewis was already out of the station wagon, coming and coming at us. His long wolfish face was flushed, and he was grinning. He grinned continually, but other people never got the grin directly, but always just sidelong parts of it, so that there was always an evasive, confident and secret craziness in his look; it was the face of a born enthusiast. He had on an Australian bush hat with a leather chin strap, and I could not help feeling that the occasion was a good one. I picked up the bow and the camera and went out with him to the car.
It was full of gear: two pup tents, ground sheets, two bows, a box of arrows, life preservers, a fly rod, groceries. He was a fanatic on preparedness—it was the carry-over from this part of him that had made me get the rope that was now looped at my side, when I knew I’d never use it, and the flying suit as well, because “nylon dries out quick”—and yet he’d take off up some logging road that hadn’t been used in fifteen years, bashing over logs and jumping gullies with no regard for himself, for the car or for whomever was with him. I hoped there wouldn’t be much of that, for standing there in the light-shift of early morning, I felt genuinely close to him. He had the appearance of always leaping to meet something, of going forward with joy and anticipation. I was tired of dragging; I felt a great deal lighter and more muscular when I was around Lewis.
Now he was hauling my gear out to the car and stowing it up. The rear window filled with equipment, almost all of it different shades of green. Before he put it in, Lewis turned my bow over in his bands.
“You’re losing glass,” he said, thumbing the edge of the upper limb.
“It’ll hold up, I think. It’s been like it is for a good long time.”
“You know,” Lewis said, “I like this bow. You stand holding it after you turn loose the string, thinking, what the hell. And then you look yonder and the arrow’s sticking in the target.”